Whiny yet grateful

I counted up the hours I will have spent this week on church calling related meetings and activities and wondered if you'd like to hear the number?  

Prepare yourself. 

22 hours.  

This includes meetings, a New Beginnings, Ward Conferences, a YCL retreat/party, preparing messages for three of those events (I'm giving four different talks/messages this month - it was going to be five but I offloaded one, thankfully.)  This number doesn't include the number of emails, phone calls and texts that were related to my calling (hundreds of email - I am not exaggerating.)  

I'm not complaining.  I really wouldn't have it any other way.  I would be really sad to not be serving the youth of my stake but it's just a little crazy right now.  I am feeling incredibly blessed and inspired as I prepare my talks.  I'm healthy.  I'm getting some sleep (I think I got 10 hours last night - first time in forEVER.) So for the most part, things are okay.

However, I've had a couple of stressful things happen this month - heartbreaking things that have shook me to my core, pretty much.  I've cried a lot.  I've worried a lot.  I've prayed a lot.  I've questioned myself and my decisions.  I've felt completely and utterly alone, at times.

But I really think the reason I haven't curled up into the fetal position and taken to my bed is because of three things...my job, my friends and my calling.  I have been able to go to work each day and concentrate on other things for several hours which has helped a ton.  I have some solid-as-a-rock friends who are there for me consistently and completely.  Friends who invite me to dinner and email me and call me and listen to me whine about my sadness and confusion.  Then I have a calling that brings me such joy, I find it hard to express just exactly how much.

I guess I just want to blog today about gratitude.  Even though another year has begun with me still wanting, I'm grateful that overall, I'm happy and fulfilled.  I'm grateful for my faith and my membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I have a good life, a fun life and a life that is filled with love and happiness.  Really, what more could a girl ask for?

Okay a girl could ask for a couple of pictures in a blog once in awhile...here are some random happy things from the holidays:

The Robinson's gave me a Kindle Paperwhite - I wept.

Me and my seester in Mom's pantry

The J's: Jana, Jaylene & Jenilee

My adorable soon to be a missionary in Ecuador niece Dolly

me and the Allen girls

Roberto as a horse

My  mom and Soph

Matt the photo bomb at Natalie's baptism

Willy Wonka Kids

Two of my nephews were in their school play recently.  My nephew Matthew played the Candy Man (the guy who sings the song and sells the candy to the kids.)  

My other nephew Nathan was an Oompa Loompa (he's in the orange striped shirt.)

They did such a great job.  Matthew sang a solo, basically and he was SO good.  Yes I'm biased but seriously, he was fantastic.  I'm go grateful I got to see him on stage and I hope he decides to do more things like this because I think he's very talented.  

 For the millionth time, I'm SO glad these guys are a short 45 minutes away.

Easter

Every year, my mom hosts an Easter egg hunt in her palatial, park like back yard and we totally lucked out this year with actual sunshine.  My two younger sisters came over with their kids and we had a nice little party.  I decided the day before that I wanted to make sugar cookies for the kids to frost so I spent all morning rolling and cutting out and baking.  I loved it but I made way too many cookies.  The kids frosted like one each, basically.  I had lots to give away to my friends and visiting teaching ladies.

I have to say that these cookies were awesome.  So.  Dang.  Good.

The creative process is about to begin - Mom is already sampling in the background!

Beautiful Rylee

Carsen not wanting his photo taken

Nice frosting job, Matthew!

The kids ready to go hunt eggs.

Kenna and Natalie...can you tell Natalie was getting sick? The only kid with a coat on!

Someone found a golden egg!

Sisters!

Matt/Matthew

This is Matt.  Matt is married to my youngest sister, Jenilee.  He's in the Army and they used to live in Hawaii but now they live about 45 minutes south of my house (which is even more awesome than Hawaii.  Yes, I really mean that.)

Matt is a wonderful husband to my sister and a fantastic father to their four children. Matt and Jenilee are one of those rare couples who truly love spending time together and really are each other's best friend.  Matt is hilarious, smart and kind.

This is Matthew.  He's Jen and Matt's second child and oldest son and he turned 12 last week.  He's getting so grown up that he asked for clothes for his birthday. 

Matthew is super smart, loves to read, is the ASB president at his school and has a solo in his upcoming school play. He is a sweet boy and I absolutely adore spending time with him.


I drove down to their neck of the woods last week for Matthew's birthday dinner at Red Robin.  This is why their living here rather than Hawaii is way better because I could jump in the car on a whim to go see them.  I'm so grateful they're close!

Jen and Nathan

Natalie & the birthday boy

Natalie, Matthew, Nathan and McKenzie

On Sunday, we drove down to their house to attend church with them.  When a boy turns 12 in our church, it's a big deal because he is given the Aaronic Priesthood.  This ordination was even more special because we worried for awhile that it might not happen.  As I mentioned before, Matt is in the Army and he had his third deployment coming up.  For several weeks, we worried that Matt would deploy days before Matthew's 12th birthday.  My family prayed hard that somehow, some way, Matt would be able to stay home until March 15 and Heavenly Father answered our prayers.  Matt ordained Matthew a Deacon on Sunday and he left for a far away land two days later.

Sunday was wonderful and lovely.  Matt's parents and his brother and family were there as well as my mom, the Kings and me.  After church, we went back to Jen's for a yummy dinner.  After a fun day together, we said goodbye to Matt and I had to practically run out of the house before I started bawling.  I'm such a baby about goodbyes! Ugh. Thankfully, this deployment is relatively short and we should have Matty home by Christmas.

I'm grateful for family. I know I'm supposed to be in the family I'm in and I'm thankful to know that we are sealed together forever.

Catch-up post #1

I fell off the blogging wagon - and hard.  So since I know you've all been missing me like crazy, I'll catch you up on what exciting things I've been up to.  

First, I went to my niece Makenna's basketball game.  It was SO fun to watch plus I got to hang out with Jax, Rylee and Carsen too.  This is Makenna's first basketball experience and she's doing great.

Kenna loves basketball - and she wears Jordan's!

Carsen and Jax - they kind of love getting their picture taken.

Rylee = adorable

Kenna and her beloved Justice water bottle

I love that I have family close by and I can go to stuff like this. I also love that I get to see them on Sunday's as our wards overlap.  It's good for my soul to walk by a classroom and get a hug and a kiss from one of these sweet kids.  I love being an auntie!

My day was awesome

In case you were wondering,

I cried through it but my talk to the YW went great.

The missionary talks were wonderful - I loved seeing the maturity and growth in these young men.  They will be fantastic missionaries.

Natalie's song was beautiful and who knew her cute husband could play the piano too?  They are so sneaky.

My friend's talk about being a light to the world was fantastic and such a great reminder to me that people are always watching us (and no, I'm not talking about in a stalker sort of way!)

Jaylene's birthday dinner turned out great.  I made enough food (17 people) and I think everyone enjoyed everything.  Jaylene was happy so that's really all that matters. We ate, played some silly games, laughed a lot and just had a wonderful evening.  Here are some pics - some fuzzy because for some reason, my flash keeps getting turned off:

Jax gave his mom 3 nickels for her birthday.

The King's gave Jaylene a Bath & Body Works gift card

Okay, one of the fuzzy ones but it made me laugh. Kenna & Jax are hilarious.

Me still in my apron and Jaylene with my gift to her - downloaded from this site. I printed several more and they are stored inside the frame. Just search under "subway art" if you want to do these yourself.

Jaylene is so excited to blow out candles! (finally figured out the flash!)

Like we would ever forget whose birthday it is, Jaylene!!!

What I'm doing on this Sabbath day

I just started thinking about everything I have to do tomorrow and it made my head hurt.  I love Sundays - seriously, I really do but most of my Sundays make me wish it was time for General Conference again.  Oh to have nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit on the couch for two days straight!

Anyway, here is what I'm doing tomorrow:

1. Skipping two ward conferences and trying not to feel guilty about it.
2. Speaking to a group of young women from another ward during their Sunday class time
3. Writing what I need to say to the girls mentioned in item #2.
4. Attending my own ward's sacrament meeting to hear an outgoing missionary speak and my friend Natalie sing
5. Attending yet another ward's sacrament meeting to hear a friend speak
6. Making manicotti and all that goes with it for 18 people.  Yes.  18 people. Well, 8 of those people are under the age of 13 but still...
7. Celebrating my sister Jaylene's 33rd birthday with said manicotti dinner. I don't seem to have a good picture of the two of us so I'll try to take one tomorrow. Instead, here's an awesome pic of her and her sweet family that I lifted off of Facebook.

Happy birthday Bethy!!! xoxo

My momma

I have the best mother ever.

I came home from my little trip this weekend to find the pots on my patio filled with flowers. She loves me and still takes such good care of me even though I am eight days away from turning 44 and can pretty much take care of myself.

She's fun, she's sweet, she's smart and the best worker I've ever known. Anytime I need something bought, baked, sewn, cleaned or fixed, she will do it for me.

I feel like everyone who reads my blog knows that I'm adopted but in case you didn't know, well, I'm adopted. Shortly after they married, my mom and dad decided they wanted a little girl so they called an attorney and voila, they got me.

I've never felt an urge to find out who my birth parents are because I know with everything that I am that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be. 

The mom I have is the only mom I've ever wanted and I will be forever grateful that she chose to adopt me.

Family pictures

My mom's birthday is this week so we got together on Saturday to do a little celebrating by taking a family pic, which we haven't done in ages.  My brothers weren't crazy about it but played along with our gray/pink/denim theme.  My sister's friend, Miss Andrea (she's my friend too, so there) very kindly came over and took our pictures in my mom's front yard.

In the rain (I am loving Jen's "work!" pose.)

With bossy girls telling the photographer what to do. 

And boys who weren't the least bit excited about being there (but they faked it well, don't you think?)

But I love the pictures and the cute girl who took them.

But most of all, I love the people in them.

Three things

There are three things I don't want to blog about but I'm going to anyway to keep this from being a Bachelorette-only blog and they are:

1. My callings.  I'm super busy with my church callings.  Like, every day there's something to do kind of busy.  Like, I can't think about anything else kind of busy.  I guess that's what happens when you are a callings hog and have three of them at once.  If I'm not working on camp stuff, I'm going to marathon length Youth Conference meetings (you need me to create thank you's for 55 people by Thursday?  No problem!) or I'm trying to think of creative ways to sing, review and repeat the same song every Sunday in Primary until those darling children are singing it in their sleep. It will get better...it will get better...it will get better.

2. My job.  I love my new job and feel great about the change I made back in March.  However, not everything has been perfect.  At the risk of blogging something I will eventually feel guilty about and delete, I will just say that we don't always work with people we would normally choose to spend hours each day with.  Sometimes we get snapped at or ignored and not because we have done anything to deserve it.  I did my best to tune it out, block it out, ignore it – but it still always stung a bit. Why should I care that a person I barely know is mean to me? Well, I haven’t yet figured out how to not care if people don’t like me. I’m hoping that comes with 50 since it sure didn’t happen when I turned 40, dang it.  The great thing is I work for a large company and that means that people move to new jobs in different buildings far, far away and everyone is happier because of it.  Especially me.

3. My dad.  I loved him.  We had a far from ideal relationship.  He wasn't the perfect dad and I certainly wasn't the perfect daughter but I'm thinking about him today and wishing things had been different and better.

Five before bedtime

1. I interviewed for "the job" yesterday. It went very well and now I'm playing the waiting game. I loathe playing the waiting game. It's my least favorite game.

2. My favorite candies are now available in stores, staring at me as I try to pay for my healthy groceries. Dear Cadbury Creme Eggs and Peanut Butter M&Ms/speckled egg variety, why are you so fabulously good??? Get thee hence.

3. This should really be a post in and of itself but last week I took a day off work so I could watch my sister's four kids overnight while Jen and her home from Iraq husband could go stay downtown. Here's what I did while playing favorite auntie/pseudo mom...

I made my bro-in-law's favorite cookies:

I let this cute dog (and the other one who isn't quite as cute) in and out all day.

I went shopping at the mall during the 3 hours Natalie was at school on Friday and found my way cute interview outfit. I celebrated by stopping at Sonic on the way home. I got a lovely drink chock full of limes and crushed ice. Yum.

I attempted to do Natalie's hair before school. I should have taken a better picture but it was not pretty. I'm not one of those girls who grew up doing everyone's hair. I can barely style my own hair, let alone anyone else's. She was nice about it though. Thank goodness she's only five and doesn't care (and seriously isn't she just the cutest?)

I played this very fun game. Love it although now it's stressing me out because it's gotten too hard.

But the best news is that this restaurant paid for Jen & Matt's dinner after Jen told them Matt was home on R&R. THEN their hotel gave them an upgraded room for free. I love it when businesses are kind and generous so I linked to them and when you are so inclined, you should give them your business as a thank you.

4. I spent time with these wonderful girls this weekend. It does my heart good to see them. My favorite thing was laughing uncontrollably during games on Saturday night (Celebrity Taboo!) Sigh. I love to laugh almost as much as I love these girls. I think I'm laughing (or more likely, talking) in this picture. I'm a dork.

5. Should #5 be A. that I played on the trivia team again this week and we won for the second week in a row, despite the fact that two of my correct answers were pooh-poohed in the final round (the animated sequel to Disney's Peter Pan is what? And what 80s movie series was set in Hill Valley, CA?) Or B. should it be that my boyfriend, Mr. Crushworthy came to visit me today? Hmm. Both are good and noteworthy. The latter included a hug so I'm thinking I'll go with B.